Whenever
a new document expressing the social teaching of the Church is issued, the
shorthand of common parlance tends to turn it into the document (encyclical,
pastoral letter, exhortation, etc.) on economics or politics. This is not merely
sloppy; it creates erroneous expectations and interpretations. The Church does
not have anything to teach within the disciplines of economics or political
science, any more than its teachings fall within the disciplines of biology or
electrical engineering. The Church teaches theology. But theology is relevant to
politics and economics because every political question, and every question of
economic theory, is at root theological.

The most important thing to know about economics is that economics is not the
most important thing. This truth has been affirmed, more or less explicitly, in
every one of the magisterial documents touching on the moral dimension of social
and economic life.

In <Sollicitudo Rei Socialis>, Pope John Paul stresses that "the
Church does not propose economic or political systems or programs . . . provided
that human dignity is properly respected and promoted . . ." In
<Centesimus Annus> he repeats, "The Church has no models to present.
. . . Her contribution to the political order is precisely her vision of the
dignity of the person revealed in all its fullness in the mystery of the
Incarnate Word."

In her teaching capacity, the mission of the Church is to expound the Gospel,
to help men know Jesus Christ, and hence to know themselves and their destiny.
The Church speaks to us as "an expert in humanity." So it is, as Pope
John Paul insisted in <Sollicitudo>, that the social doctrine of the
Church belongs to the domain of theology, and specifically of moral theology,
and not to that of economics or the social sciences. It is precisely for this
reason that the social doctrine of the Church is binding in conscience. A
religious assent is required of Catholics, not to any set of propositions in the
domains of economics or politics, but to the truths of moral theology which
comprise Catholic social doctrine.

This is certainly not to say that the Church is indifferent to social,
political and economic institutions. Far from it! But the ground on which a
particular social theory or institution is judged worthy or unworthy of human
dignity is not an exercise of social science or of efficiency, but of morality.

In his most recent encyclical, commemorating and carrying forward a
tremendous century of Catholic social teaching, the Holy Father praises the
"business economy" and asserts a right to economic initiative as a
constituent element of human dignity. The business economy is deemed good not
merely on pragmatic grounds (although its practical efficiency is acknowledged),
but in principle. It is a social structure in keeping with human nature and
human dignity.

This comes as sweet music to the ears of those who admire the American
experience and American principles of social organization, and their
gratification is not without foundation. While it may be too much to say that
the Church has formally extended its blessing to the socio-economic order which
has grown up in this country, it is certainly true that the Church rejects the
complaints of those who, in the name of Christian faith, condemn as
fundamentally and irretrievably immoral the business economy as it exists in our
country.

Moreover, it is certainly true that the Church does reject, as fundamentally
and irretrievably immoral, state socialism of the kind that the peoples of
Eastern Europe are in the process of freeing themselves from and which, sadly,
has been the <desideratum> of many of those same critics of the American
economic order. Nor is this condemnation novel. It was clearly delivered in
<Rerum Novarum> and the Church has never wavered in that judgment.

But in <Centesimus Annus> Pope John Paul was not judging a debate
between the Chamber of Commerce and the Politburo. The practical policy
conclusions that might be drawn from this or any encyclical would have to be
regarded as, at best, peripheral.

What we Catholic Americans need to do in response to a new articulation of
the Church's social doctrine is to assess our own culture and its institutions,
to see how they measure up against the principles taught by the Church, and to
imagine how our society might be brought into closer conformity with a Christian
vision of society.

In considering the encounter between Catholic social teaching and the
American experience, the question of socialism is hardly relevant. The United
States is one of the few developed nations in which socialist ideas have never
been embraced by any large segment of the people. On the contrary, the central
question facing Catholic Americans is whether our culture and our social and
political arrangements are in fact liberal, as that term is used in the
tradition of Catholic social teaching.

The Church's firm and unwavering condemnation of socialism has been matched,
since even before Pope Leo, by an equally firm and unwavering condemnation of
liberalism. And liberalism has been a dominant current in American social
thought. It is necessary, therefore, to discern what the Church means by
liberalism, and what liberalism means in the American context, in order to offer
a sound judgment on the American order in the light of the Church's social
teaching.

For light on the meaning of liberalism as it is used in the tradition of the
papal teachings, I turn to a non-ecclesiastical source, the Spanish statesman
and philosopher Juan Donoso Cortes. I do so because Donoso rendered the most
trenchant critique of liberalism and socialism that I know; and also because he
had a direct influence on the teaching of Pope Pius IX, as well as an indirect
influence on the whole tradition of Catholic social doctrine, an influence which
is evident even in the writings of Pope John Paul. It was Donoso Cortes, for
example, who first introduced the concept of "solidarity" into
Catholic discourse on the socio-political order, and Pope John Paul has made
that very concept the cornerstone of Catholic social teaching for our time.

Another reason why Donoso Cortes provides an appropriate angle of approach to
the question is, I believe, that he framed the issue correctly. We are
accustomed to using spatial metaphors to understand philosophical conflict, and
especially conflicts in political philosophy; and the tendency of many
commentators is to place liberalism at one extreme, socialism at the other, and
the Catholic view somewhere in the middle. But Donoso understood liberalism to
be a way-station to socialism, and socialism to be the logical culmination of
liberal principles. Catholicism is the truth; liberalism an error; and socialism
a more extreme case of that same error. The history of liberalism over the past
century and a half attests to the clarity of Donoso's vision. Liberalism did not
drift from John Stuart Mill to Leo XIII to Karl Marx. It drifted directly from
Mill to Marx. Liberalism has proven to be not the antidote, but the antechamber
to socialism.

Liberalism, according to Donoso, is the socio-political manifestation of a
theological error, namely, the denial of original sin, or as he put it, the
affirmation of the immaculate conception of man.

Assuming the immaculate conception of man, it follows that the human
intellect and the human will are perfect. If the intellect is unclouded, it is
capable of discovering the truth on its own; and if the will is steadfast, it is
capable of desiring what the intellect knows and choosing what it desires. Truth
emerges out of methodical doubt, like Minerva from the head of Zeus, through the
medium of free discussion—the marketplace of ideas. (Hence, liberalism is
inevitably relativistic.) Even more characteristic of liberalism, however, is
its peculiar notion of freedom. According to the liberal dogma, the exercise of
free will—the highest of all human acts—consists precisely in choosing
freely between good and evil.

Now, this definition of freedom, which is the very core of liberalism, would
probably be accepted as a mere truism by most people in the Western world. It
seems so obvious that it would be difficult to imagine an alternative definition
of freedom which is not cynically Orwellian. Yet it is an understanding of
freedom which is absolutely false, which is condemned in Sacred Scripture, and
condemned by the highest authority of the Church. Dr. Buttiglione has alluded to
the falsity of this notion in an address he delivered earlier this year linking
<Rerum Novarum> with an earlier encyclical of Pope Leo, <Libertas>.
He argued the inextricable linkage between freedom and truth, a linkage which I
wish to stress.

Freedom does not consist in the power to choose between good and evil. If it
did, then God is not free. If it did, then man could not remain free as he grows
in moral virtue, nor grow in virtue if he remains free.

Freedom consists in the power to do good; and we know what is good by
becoming enlightened as to the truth. Our Lord was not indulging in metaphor
when He said, "the truth shall make you free." He who does not know
the truth cannot choose the good, and therefore is not free. There is no freedom
which is not grounded in an apprehension of truth.

There are certain social and political institutions that are compatible with,
indeed natural to, liberalism defined as Donoso and the Popes define it. They
include democracy, civil liberties and a market economy. (I hasten to add that
liberalism is not necessarily the only soil in which these institutions might
grow.) And historically, it cannot be denied that liberalism was a major
contributing factor in the shaping of America's most important social and
political institutions.

But what the Church condemns in liberalism is not the institutions of
democratic capitalism. Indeed, it has judged those institutions in themselves to
be good and in conformity with human dignity. What is in question is the ethical
and cultural system which produces these institutions, the spirit which animates
them, the philosophic premises which sustain them.

Liberalism is admittedly one strong current in the shaping of American
culture. But is it therefore correct to say that American society is simply
liberal? Are there not other, more wholesome forces that have shaped and
continue to shape our society?

I refuse to grant that American culture is simply liberalism incarnate. I
refuse to grant that Christians live in America only on sufferance, only so long
as we burn our incense before the altars of the liberal idols. Liberalism has
not been and is not now the only formative influence shaping American culture.

Since Columbus—and even since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock and Lord
Baltimore—America has been part of Christendom. Historically, Christianity has
been at least as strong an influence in the shaping of American culture as has
liberalism. True, that Christianity may have been a truncated, impoverished,
reformed Christianity. Nonetheless, the Christian Bible, Christian ethics, a
Christian understanding of man and of history have been the dominant forces
shaping the real, living America.

Christianity and liberalism have always coexisted, and always in tension, in
American culture. The problem is that, because American Christianity was not of
the robust Roman sort, the task of reflecting on American social and political
institutions and of articulating them philosophically has been dominated by the
liberals. The only language that has been current to describe our institutions
of democracy and civil liberties and the market economy has been the language of
liberalism; and as a consequence, the more educated Americans become, the more
they tend to adopt a liberal understanding of these institutions.

But consider some truths about the real America, even the present-day
America.

Americans prize individual freedom, but we are not individualists. We
spontaneously form voluntary associations to a degree unparalleled by any other
culture. In practice, Americans have, and have always had, a strong sense of
social solidarity—the very pinnacle of Catholic social teaching. We are by
inclination communitarian, personalistic, responsible for one another. In fact,
one of the less desirable characteristics of our deeply democratic culture is
that we have a strong tendency to conformism. We are suspicious, though
tolerant, of anyone who is markedly different, even in matters of taste.

Americans are wealthy, but we are not materialistic. We are more likely than
the people of other nations to pay our taxes honestly, and to impose additional
taxes upon ourselves to aid those less fortunate. And still, we contribute
enormous portions of our wealth to all sorts of charities. We disapprove of
greed, sharp dealing and ostentation, and we are moved less by the desire for
personal gain than by spiritual ideals.

Americans think—because we have been told by our betters that this is the
"American Way"—that we have to tolerate every sort of moral
abomination as the price of a free society. But we still know right from wrong.
We are too ready to concede that a mere evil is a necessary evil; but we are not
so bereft of our senses as to imagine that what we take to be necessary evils
are positive goods. The defenders of pornography and drugs, abortion and divorce
intimidate us by insisting that if we are not free to choose these necessary
evils, then we are not free at all. But they know better than to try to force us
to admit that they are actually good.

America has an atheistic public order; but we are a religious people. Thanks
to the arrogance of the liberals, ours is the only country outside of Cuba where
it is unlawful to read the Bible in a public school, and ours is the only
civilized country in the world where parents are financially punished for
attempting to educate their children according to their own convictions. But
Americans are more likely to go to church each week, more likely to pray daily,
more likely to profess Christianity than the people of almost any other nation
on earth.

Our economic system is described as capitalistic, a word that conjures images
of robber barons and Wall Street wizards. Yet who owns our great economic
enterprises? Bank depositors, insurance policy holders, the participants in
pension plans—in other words, the great mass of the American people!

In short, the real experience of Americans, in our social, political and
economic life, is considerably closer to the ideal envisioned in Catholic social
teaching than it is to the mechanical diagrams of liberal ideology, in its
nineteenth or its twentieth century formulation. Please note, I am not saying
that America's social institutions attain that ideal; but rather that they are
not essentially and irretrievably liberal and that they are potentially, if they
are guided in the right direction, conformable with Catholic social teaching.

But the concepts and language we are accustomed to using to describe our
society are inappropriately saturated with liberalism. And if we use the
language of liberalism, we inevitably come to understand reality according to
the philosophy of liberalism.

This poses a challenge for American Catholic leaders. We admire Catholic
social doctrine because we can see that the Church, as the custodian of truth,
as an expert in humanity, has successfully applied right reason to the questions
of society. And right reason is something we can communicate to our non-Catholic
neighbors far more readily and with far less resistance than we can communicate
revealed truth. Catholic social doctrine gives us an alternative language to
that of liberalism, and that alternative language is, frankly, better suited to
describe the social reality which our nation has lived. By importing that
alternative language into our nation's public discourse, we can help our fellow
Americans understand our own culture better, understand how to improve that
culture in accordance with right reason, and understand how to free ourselves
from the poisonous dominance of liberal error.

This is not an impossible task. Earlier in this century the great Monsignor
John Ryan—with the active support of the hierarchy and the Catholic people—carried
Catholic social doctrine into the political arena and made them a reality. The
family wage, unemployment insurance, workmen's compensation, and the protection
of women and children from hazards in the workplace were among the great
achievements of that era, all derived from the Church's social doctrine. Sadly,
some of those hard-won gains have been lost since then because Catholics lost
their sense of mission. But we Catholics are in a far better position now than
we were in Monsignor Ryan's day to shape the culture and policy of our nation.
It is simply a matter of regaining our faith.

Michael Schwartz is resident fellow in social policy for the Free Congress
Foundation and one of the leading pro-family policy analysts and activists in
the nation's capital.

This article was taken from the Winter 1991 issue of "Faith &
Reason". Subscriptions available from Christendom Press, 2101 Shenandoah
Shores Road, Ft. Royal, VA 22630, 703-636-2900, Fax 703-636-1655. Published
quarterly at $20.00 per year.